Defining and Exploring Local Production in the Indus Civilization: A Focus on Gradation and Value

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Where Is Provenance? Bridging Method, Evidence, and Theory for the Interpretation of Local Production" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Indus Civilization of Bronze Age Pakistan and Northwest India (c. 3800-1900 BCE) had a complex system of productions, consumption, and exchange at local, regional, and interregional scales. I join my recent research of intra-site production patterns and regional GIS analysis material exchange with the current body of research concerning craft production, based upon experimental and ethnographic studies, and geologic and other provenance studies. The resulting picture indicates that there are many degrees of products "localness", resulting from complex chaîne opératoires and communities both bounded and unbounded by geography and polities. Moreover, the geographic origin of raw materials does not always correlate with artifact frequency or valuation, challenging narratives of the local and exotic dichotomy.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Where Is Provenance? Bridging Method, Evidence, and Theory for the Interpretation of Local Production   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23197